Wednesday, 16 July 2014

THE NATURALS

Fifteen or so years back I was
walking down the street when a black Mercedes pulled up at the kerb next to me.
The driver's door swung open and the then Newcastle centre-forward Mick Quinn
emerged. The mustachioed scouser cast a furtive glance to left and right to
check for traffic wardens, and then dashed up the pavement and into the betting
shop. A man standing nearby raised his eyebrows. "I've been to every home
game at St James' since we bought him and that's the furthest I've ever seen
him run," he said.

The comment was not made with any
malice, or sense of grievance. The man was grinning when he said it and
finished with what can only be described as a chortle. Mick Quinn was held in
high regard. Whenever I saw him I thought of Bob Paisley's observation about
Ray Kennedy: "He's not quick, but he's nippy." Paisley had a habit of
making pronouncements so gnomic they came with their own fishing rod and cap,
yet you always knew what he meant, just about. Quinn wasn't fast, but he could
cover two yards before you could say "tubby". Most of the time,
though, he barely raised himself above a saunter, calling to mind a plumber
who'd been sent to buy supplies during his lunch break. People admired him
almost as much for this affable slowness as for his goals. They liked the fact
that he didn't cavort around like a bullock let out into spring pastures. They
liked his comfortable outline that called to mind my old biology teacher's
description of the frog, which was "streamlined in a barge-like manner".
They appreciated the way he moved like a bloke who'd just put his sandwich
down.

In the film Chariots of Fire the
Harold Abrahams character berates a British athletics official for objecting to
his use of a professional coach. "You want us to win, but you want us to
win without effort. You want us to win like gods," he says. Football fans
are different from 1920s athletics officials in this latter respect. We don't
want the players to win like gods, but every so often we enjoy watching one win
like a bloke from down the pub.

This, along with his assured
performances, surely accounts for the mounting popularity on Wearside of Andy
Reid. The former Spurs midfielder has the dishevelled roly-poly looks of
someone who might knock on your door one afternoon and announce that he has
some leftover tarmac from a job down the road and do you want your driveway
doing? Whenever I have seen him I have gone away with the impression that he
had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth with half-an-inch of ash wilting
from the tip. When it comes to sprinting well, frankly, the Irishman makes Mick
Quinn look like Bryan Habana.

Though Reid may give the
impression of being so slow that birds might nest in his hair, like Oliver
Hardy, he has small and nimble feet and that eerie ability when centre stage to
momentarily make it appear that the rest of the world has stood still while he
remains in motion.

According to Roy Keane, Reid
"likes a drink and a sing-song". This will undoubtedly add to his
appeal. A friend of mine recently claimed that Middlesbrough's decision to buy
Mido could only have been based on chairman Steve Gibson's nostalgia for the
days of Alan "Fatty" Foggon and Gary Hamilton, a Scots midfielder who
was purpose-built to carry the Boro's 1980s sponsor's logo, Heritage Hampers,
across his chest.

The luckless Egyptian is someone
who gives a whole new meaning to the term wide man, though he is clearly
planning to lose weight, because if that arse is a permanent structure he would
have had to apply for planning permission for it by now. And besides, Mido is
far too clean living and dedicated to ever be compared to the man justly
celebrated in the Middlesbrough version of the Deck of Cards (Teessiders feel
free to join in): "And when I see the nine I think of the number of pints
Alan Foggon used to drink before a match. And when I see the 10 ... I think of
the number of pints Alan Foggon used to drink before a match."

The point about Quinn, Reid,
Foggon and all the other players who look like they just stepped out of the
saloon bar and on to the pitch is that they fulfil a subconscious need in all
of us. They lend credence to the concept of The Natural. The belief in a
sporting gift so wondrous that it requires no coaching, dedication or hard work
to perfect is a great comfort to most of us, because the time has passed when
we can spend 12 hours a day practising our ball skills or running up sand
dunes.

Our only remaining hope of gaining glory is that one day we will
absent-mindedly pick up a club, bat or racket and discover that - My God! -
this is what I was born to do. And 12 months down the line Gary Lineker will be
looking at us in amazement and saying: "So, when you hit that golf ball
600 yards down the fairway you had no idea how incredible it was?" And we
can take another big bite out of our pie, nod and say: "No, and to be
honest, Gary, I didn't even know I was using a sand wedge."

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.